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Morals and the Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Bernard Bergonzi
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Dante, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, wandering among the souls of those damned for incontinence, meets the lovers, Paolo and Francesca. He is told that they fell from chastity after reading a book, the story of Lancelot. ‘Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. . . .’

      Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;
      quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

‘The book, and he who wrote it was a Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther.’ And as the commentators tell us, for ‘Galeotto’ we may read ‘pandar’. Here we have what is, I think, a locus classicus for the problem under discussion: the meeting-place of behaviour and literature and morals; and an occasion for apprehension for both the moralist and the writer, though for very different reasons.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 39 , Issue 462 , September 1958 , pp. 354 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 I A paper read at a Literary Weekend at Spode House, Hawkesyard Priory, in July 1958.

2 That is to say, literical poetry: narrative or dramatic poems clearly present similar problems to the novel.

3 Art and Scholasticism (1930). p. 171.

4 The Man of Letters in the Modern World. New York, 1955, pp. 11-22.

5 Henry Davis, S.J. Moral and Pastoral Theology (1949) 11, 227.

6 It seems to me, incidentally, that the whole question of the effect of reading on the imagination and on our actions, which the moralists have traditionally treated in a very cut-and-dried fashion, might profitably be re-examined in the light of our present knowledge of affective psychology.

7 The Nature of Art (1946) p. 251.

8 ‘Morals and Civilization in Henry James’: Carnbridge Journal, December 1953.

9 The Opposing Self (1955), pp. 206-230.

10 Fr Herbert McCabe, o.P., has suggested that this is a very inadequate view of the nature of moral theology.

11 Though moeurs may themselves have a spiritual dimension: the relation between courtesy and charity is a profound one.

12 The Liberal Imagination ( 1950 ) , pp. 205-222.

13 Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954), pp. 56-57.

14 Ibid., p. 71.

15 Henry James and H. G. Wells (Ed. Edel and Ray, 1958), p. 144.

16 The Idea ofa University (New York, 1947), pp. 203-204.